Quote Originally Posted by Eastwall View Post
To this day, l still can't get the why healer needs to contribute to dps check.
It hinges on that old, old MMO adage, "surplus is a waste". Once you've healed everyone enough to survive the next hit, and assuming you don't need to conserve MP (as was needed in older MMOs), what do? If you're a top-tier healer, you use your DPS spells just to have something to press.

Now, why would this be a problem? Well, good healers can identify and reach the state of 'everyone will survive the next hit' faster, so they end up nuking more, so they end up doing more DPS. A lot more DPS. Therefore, good healers help clear fights much faster. But... the devs don't want us to clear their high-end fights too fast. They have a particular timetable and content lifespan in mind and they don't like it when big chunks of the playerbase finish early and get bored. Not least because we pester them about it on the forums, but also because we do things like unsubscribe until the next raid tier drops.

So, as a game dev, there are three design paths you can take to prevent healers from just blasting away all the time and breezing past the DPS check -- 1.) make healer damage spells worth less damage, though this makes soloing and questing as a healer horrible, 2.) make healing and resource management harder so healers can't DPS as much, or 3.) increase the DPS check so that healer DPS is factored into the expected clear times.

FF14 devs chose the third path. DPS checks were much stricter in the Heavensward raids than in the ARR raids, and healing checks were much more forgiving. Healing checks have gotten more forgiving in every expansion since.

And then, peripheral to that is the problem that healer kits grew around the wound as more expansions released. I don't know if the devs perceived a desire from the players to just have more flashy buttons that can top everyone off instantly, or if they're just not good at designing fun heal spells with kit interplay that still work on controller, or both, but now in Shadowbringers and Endwalker you can handle most healing with free party-wide oGCDs without ever dropping a nuke cast, making the problem worse than ever.